Tōd: Bluetooth 4.0 beacons that activate automatic alerts

It looks like you can get them for $30/piece, if you buy 5 (i.e. $150, total). Perhaps these folks could go into their BOM costs, and show that the seeming-premium is for forward compatibility going w/ BT 4.0. It seems like whoever is selling the 4.0 ASIC (Broadcom, CSR, etc), is recouping their initial costs as fast as possible.

But, supposedly, they are losing money on even $32/unit (see the comments) with someone else willing to make up the difference in pricing.

kondro, first off thanks for the love in the Hacker News Channel on yCombinator.

The price points we started with for Kickstarter were based around manufacturer and delivery of 1500 tōd Smart Beacons and finalization of our architecture. The design is built around the Bluegiga BLE112a which retails for $26 alone.

We would love to eventually get the tōd Smart Beacons to sub $10 price range, or even come up with ways for the beacons to be free. However even at $40 (current retail price) they are still drastically cheaper than other options currently on the market with none of the flexibility that tōd has to offer.

These seem to have a number of interesting possibilites, especially if the price-point can get to below $10.